Proactively “From the Sea”; leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

In every field of American life, there are Boomers who have made and are making important, selfless contributions: in hospitals, in classrooms, in government, in business, in the military. You name it and we are there.But at the level of public policy and moral leadership, as a generation we have largely failed. The Boomer Progressive Establishment in particular has been a huge disappointment to itself and to the country. The political class slumbered as the entitlement and pension crisis grew to ominous dimensions. Boomer financial leadership was selfish and shortsighted, by and large. Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years. Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.

All of this was done by a generation that never lost its confidence that it was smarter, better educated and more idealistic than its Depression-surviving, World War-winning, segregation-ending, prosperity-building parents. We didn’t need their stinking faith, their stinking morals, or their pathetically conformist codes of moral behavior. We were better than that; after all, we grokked Jefferson Airplane, achieved nirvana on LSD and had a spiritual wealth and sensitivity that our boorish bourgeois forbears could not grasp. They might be doers, builders and achievers — but we Boomers grooved, man, we had sex in the park, we grew our hair long, and we listened to sexy musical lyrics about drugs that those pathetic old losers could not even understand.

What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity.

To be sure, there was another facet of the generation, the hundreds of thousands - if not millions, given the span of the war and numbers of troops engaged - who served in Vietnam and got nothing but scorn from their peers at home. There were those who after Vietnam stayed to serve as officers, and proved themselves superior at Desert Storm. There were those that have built the IT boom, internet etc,, for good or bad personified by late Steve Jobs. But in the end history will judge the (lack of) leadership of those at the top.

Rather then condeming ALL boomers, it seems to me, the scorn should fall on those on the left. After all, at least since the 1980s and Reagan's presidency, those of us boomers on the right have been complaining about the basic ideas of those on the left that got us into this mess in the first place. OK, maybe we didn't do enough. But with most all of academia and the media dominated by the boomer left, it has been a constant up hilll battle. So don't paint us all with the same broad brush. Oh, and the lefties in the generations that have come behind us don't seem to be doing all that much better. OWS is the prime example of that.

I believe the allegations asserted by Mr. Mead do represent a certain small portion of the Boomer generation, the "<span>The Boomer Progressive Establishment" as Mr. Mead puts it.</span>

Not all of us were at Woodstock or spent the Summer of Love in SF. Don't let the media coverage at the time fool you, it was no more accurate about what was going on at home than it was about what was happening in Vietnam.

Most of the Boomers have quietly gone about their lives, paying their taxes, volunteering their time to Scouts, churches, the Red Cross, etc.

Who elected Ronald Reagan? It was not the WWII generation by itself. Who elected Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama and the other liberal icons? Look at yourselves and your kids, non-Boomers.

You want to point fingers? Go back to the Progressive Era and the leaders that spawned the Social Security mess and all those other massive government programs that had led to the train wreck of Obama Care.

A political generation is about ten years, not twenty. The "baby boomers" actually break down into two <span>very</span> different groups. You've got the Brat Boomers, born between ~1946-1955, and the Baby Busters, born ~1956-1965. The Brat Boomers had a safe, soft childhood - and got gobsmacked by the 1960s. The Baby Busters got the short end of the stick - we came to maturity in the 1970s, into a nation beset by the Great Inflation and a gutted foreign/defense policy.

Which is why Reagan's strongest supporters were Baby Busters. Reagan offered hope...and we hadn't had that in a long, long time.

Also quite true. One thing about the Brat Boomer decade group is how they split...one faction sucked it up and did some pretty impressive things, the other faction did their utmost to destroy the Republic.

Hey, be careful there...when I finally got tired of the game, I was a level 70 night elf hunter and I was bad-ass to the bone :) . Seriously, it was neat for a while since I enjoy a thinking tactical challenge but after a time, it really got boring; boring does not equal fun, so I quit and never looked back.

There was some serious advantages to the Social Security system when it was introduced in the 1930s. It pulled a large number of old people out of the working pool so that a whole bunch of college kids and high school kids could apply for the jobs in the factory, wall street and the stores on main street. The problem is that the program wasn't fully explained to everyone. Social Security was designed to supplement any other retirement program that was out there. When it was drafted and created the idea of working for the Dewey,Chetem, and Howe Inc for 40 years then retiring with full pension system was very true then. So Social Security was designed to help after you retired and your income flatlined. Instead it was sold as a sole source retirement plan, nothing was taught to anyone that they needed to start planning in either the 20's or 30's for retirement. So when the Greatest Generation was paying for thier parents and grandparents to retire from the work force, while their children the boomers were paying for the WW2 generation by the 1970's and 1980's. Yet, the whole time the education system and the meme coming from the AARP or other Progressives was that Social Security was going to be sole source for everyone's retirement. That everyone could be like the Grasshopper in the fable. Well, truth and reality have met head on in a dangerous collision.

Oh God.......Byron are you one of those guys who plays Dungeons and Dragons, dresses up like an extra from Lord of the Rings, makes "weapons" out of trash and play Red Bull fueled role-playing games for hours on end?

The "baby boomer" designation was not intended to cover a "political" generation. It was simply the most productive twenty years (from a procreation stand point) of the WWII generation. 1945-64.

It was not we who were identified as having so much in common, but our parents. And they did. Young people during the Depression and the War.

"Political" generations, it can be argued, can be shorter or longer than ten years. One can identify salient events that change frames of reference, which seem to well delineate "political" generations. Those old enough for Vietnam were born 1945-53. With some exceptions, of course. The so-called "Flower Children Children" started in 1968 (the summer of Love being 67), and ended in the early 1970s, where fertility rates dropped sharply.

Really it all feel apart because of the tiny most under appriceated item.

"The Pill"

When the birth rate went anemic there simply weren't enough people coming out to fullfill the needed amount of money for the system so like most of those big entitlment projects it was broken with a few decades.